Japanese printer syncs pictures with smells
An ambitious idea from the Keio University in Tokyo could see your ink-jet printer not only print out a photo of a freshly mown lawn, but also provide an appropriate waft of summer grass scent.
Presenting their work at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Multimedia conference in Florence next week, Kenichi Okada and other researchers at the university have modified a Canon printer and replaced the typical ink cartridges with vials of four different aromas.
An ink or bubble jet printer works by firing up tiny resistors to create heat. These high temperatures vapourise the ink stored in cartridges, making a bubble, which then expands and creates a droplet. That drip of ink is fired out the print head’s nozzle, and lands on the paper.
Okada’s hacked aroma-printer works in much the same way, but sends out a droplet of scent instead of colour. The tiny, picolitre of smell can make perceivable and recognisable aromas of lemon, vanilla, lavender, apple, cinnamon, grapefruit and mint, which dissipate in seconds. After a couple of sniffs, it’s gone, ready for a new smell.
But while the printer’s success marks a large step towards completing the technology, other hurdles remain. Synthesising smell isn’t quite as easy as creating colours. You can’t mix strawberry and banana to make Brighton Beach sea salt. So whereas a normal printer holds just cyan, magenta and yellow to mix the colours on the fly, this device would be a gigantic monstrosity filled with hundreds of vials for different smells.
Plus, on the software side, the researchers are having to work out how to make the printer automatically recognise elements of an image and release the appropriate aroma.
Previously, “Smell-O-Vision” was an interesting gimmick to fill cinema seats. Unfortunately, the technique was a colossal failure, and rendered the only movie it was used in, 1960’s Scent of Mystery, a laughing stock.
The film pumped containers filled with smells into pipes under the audience’s seats. But it cost theaters upwards of $1 million to install the system, the fans were noisy, and audience members had to smell so hard to pick up the faints scents that their loud sniffing distracted other viewers. Almost makes 3D seem like a good idea.
Reference Link
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/26/japan-smelly-printer
Courtesy
CondéNetUK Limited
China Wrests Supercomputer Title From U.S.
Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.
Nvidia
The Tianhe-1A computer in Tianjin, China, links thousands upon thousands of chips.
The computer, known as Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, which is at a national laboratory in Tennessee, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings.
Although the official list of the top 500 fastest machines, which comes out every six months, is not due to be completed by Mr. Dongarra until next week, he said the Chinese computer “blows away the existing No. 1 machine.” He added, “We don’t close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster.”
Officials from the Chinese research center, the National University of Defense Technology, are expected to reveal the computer’s performance on Thursday at a conference in Beijing. The center says it is “under the dual supervision of the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Education.”
The race to build the fastest supercomputer has become a source of national pride as these machines are valued for their ability to solve problems critical to national interests in areas like defense, energy, finance and science. Supercomputing technology also finds its way into mainstream business; oil and gas companies use it to find reservoirs and Wall Street traders use it for superquick automated trades. Procter & Gamble even uses supercomputers to make sure that Pringles go into cans without breaking.
And typically, research centers with large supercomputers are magnets for top scientific talent, adding significance to the presence of the machines well beyond just cranking through calculations.
Over the last decade, the Chinese have steadily inched up in the rankings of supercomputers. Tianhe-1A stands as the culmination of billions of dollars in investment and scientific development, as China has gone from a computing afterthought to a world technology superpower.
“What is scary about this is that the U.S. dominance in high-performance computing is at risk,” said Wu-chun Feng, a supercomputing expert and professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “One could argue that this hits the foundation of our economic future.”
Modern supercomputers are built by combining thousands of small computer servers and using software to turn them into a single entity. In that sense, any organization with enough money and expertise can buy what amount to off-the-shelf components and create a fast machine.
The Chinese system follows that model by linking thousands upon thousands of chips made by the American companies Intel and Nvidia. But the secret sauce behind the system — and the technological achievement — is the interconnect, or networking technology, developed by Chinese researchers that shuttles data back and forth across the smaller computers at breakneck rates, Mr. Dongarra said.
“That technology was built by them,” Mr. Dongarra said. “They are taking supercomputing very seriously and making a deep commitment.”
The Chinese interconnect can handle data at about twice the speed of a common interconnect called InfiniBand used in many supercomputers.
For decades, the United States has developed most of the underlying technology that goes into the massive supercomputers and has built the largest, fastest machines at research laboratories and universities. Some of the top systems simulate the effects of nuclear weapons, while others predict the weather and aid in energy research.
In 2002, the United States lost its crown as supercomputing kingpin for the first time in stunning fashion when Japan unveiled a machine with more horsepower than the top 20 American computers combined. The United States government responded in kind, forming groups to plot a comeback and pouring money into supercomputing projects. The United States regained its leadership status in 2004, and has kept it, until now.
At the computing conference on Thursday in China, the researchers will discuss how they are using the new system for scientific research in fields like astrophysics and bio-molecular modeling. Tianhe-1A, which is housed in a building at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, can perform mathematical operations about 29 million times faster than one of the earliest supercomputers, built in 1976.
For the record, it performs 2.5 times 10 to the 15th power mathematical operations per second.
Mr. Dongarra said a long-running Chinese project to build chips to rival those from Intel and others remained under way and looked promising. “It’s not quite there yet, but it will be in a year or two,” he said.
He also said that in November, when the list comes out, he expected a second Chinese computer to be in the top five, culminating years of investment.
“The Japanese came out of nowhere and really caught people off guard,” Mr. Feng said. “With China, you could see this one coming.”
Steven J. Wallach, a well-known computer designer, played down the importance of taking the top spot on the supercomputer rankings.
“It’s interesting, but it’s like getting to the four-minute mile,” Mr. Wallach said. “The world didn’t stop. This is just a snapshot in time.”
The research labs often spend weeks tuning their systems to perform well on the standard horsepower test. But just because a system can hammer through trillions of calculations per second does not mean it will do well on the specialized jobs that researchers want to use it for, Mr. Wallach added.
The United States has plans in place to make much faster machines out of proprietary components and to advance the software used by these systems so that they are easy for researchers to use. But those computers remain years away, and for now, China is king.
“They want to show they are No. 1 in the world, no matter what it is,” Mr. Wallach said. “I don’t blame them.”
Courtesy
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/technology/28compute.html?_r=1
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
50 ideas to change science forever
We begin with the coming revolution in biology, life and Earth: ideas such as DNA origami, super-evolution, brain maps and ultrasounding the planet. Then it’s the turn of nature on its smallest and grandest scales. From new ways to probe the quirks of the quantum world to the computing technologies of the future to the latest thinking on the workings of the cosmos, what ideas, projects and trends are shaking up the worlds of physics, space and technology.
EARTH
From wipe-outs in life’s deep history to future dead oceans, Earth sciences have no shortage of apocalypses in view. Continue reading
ECOLOGY
If you think evolution is just about individuals passing on their genes to offspring, get set for a radical reweaving of the web of life – and finance.Continue reading
GENETICS
After the genome, it’s time for the next level: the interactome and phenome. Expect biotech wizardry and a stream ofJurassic Park headlines along the way. Continue reading
NEUROSCIENCE
Thanks to better brain imaging and biological insights, we’re closing in on the neurons of consciousness and the subtleties of our mental machinery. Continue reading
ARTIFICIAL LIFE
Cells, enzymes, photosynthesis – soon we’ll be remaking life our own way. Not to mention making our own spare body parts, and taming flu once and for all.Continue reading
LIGHT AND MATTER
The Nobel-winning material of the future, how to make light do our bidding, the missing link for electronic brains, why T is the new X-ray.Continue reading
COMPUTING
Wouldn’t it be great if the internet understood what you wanted? It will, and will be studying its human symbionts too, and all at ever-faster speeds.Continue reading
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Quantum mechanics will go mechanical and your computer will run on ghostly knots, or spintronics, or maybe even slowed-down light.Continue reading
COSMOLOGY
Are you ready for the massive hidden reality promised by supersymmetry? Or the evolution of quantum mechanics? How about a black hole in your tool shed? Continue reading
ENGINEERING
We’ll haul rocks from Mars, a continent-sized telescope will look back to the universe’s dark ages and we’ll make a model of everyone alive.Continue reading
Reference Link
http://www.newscientist.com/special/50-ideas-to-change-science-forever
Courtesy
Reed Business Information Ltd.
Vinay Jaju, Piyush Jaju and Ekta Kothari, Founders, ONergy (Renewable energy venture).
Renewable Energy for Rural India
Rural India conjures up many images, of farmlands, villages and a plethora of problems. Among these problems one stands out more than others, that of energy. . In a country where more than half the populous has a cell phone, basic amenities like energy and electricity are still a distant dream. Most of Rural India spends its nights in darkness and its days without power but all that is changing thanks to Vinay Jaju, Piyush Jaju and Ekta Kothari.
Their venture ONergy is a Renewable energy venture creating energy and keeping the environment safe. They told us more about how they will accomplish all this as well as how the business idea was conceived in an interview with Yourstory.
How is your company ONergy bringing about a change in Rural India?
ONergy is a renewable energy venture, committed to sustainability and equity. We provide complete energy solutions in rural India – from deploying solar LED lights to electrifying off-grid villages and subsequently provide clean cooking solutions.
We partner with Micro Finance organizations/NGO’s etc – to train and empower rural entrepreneurs who provide energy solutions in rural India. We are focused at eradicating the use of kerosene and diesel used for lighting and electrification in rural India and efficient use of biomass for cooking.
We believe energy is the core to India’s development and environment crisis – and to facilitate better health, education, clean water and agriculture – we aim to ONergize 1 million rural lives by providing decentralised renewable energy solutions across India, in the next 5 years.
What is the impact that ONergy will have on the future of rural India?
2/3rd of India does not receive clean energy – mainly residing in rural India and semi-urban areas. We work at replacing the use of fossil fuel – kerosene and diesel – used for lighting and electrification – so we are also looking at providing energy to telecom, food processing & storage etc in rural India.
We aim to “ONergize” 1 million rural lives in the next 5 years.
How does your business model benefit your rural demographic while remaining sustainable for you as a company?
We marry appropriate technology and innovative financing to create Renewable Energy Centres in partnership with MFIs/NGOs and deploy Lighting & Cooking products through a network of rural entrepreneurs, subsequently electrify villages.
We create value for our consumers by providing training and servicing for products and by delivery high quality products/service at affordable prices.
Our Competitive Advantage:
Affordability – Installment payment through MFIs and Banks
Customization – After understanding customer needs and pain points
Complete energy solutions approach
Infrastructure & Network for servicing
Training & Marketing support
How can you grow the business to reach more parts of India?
We setup Renewable energy centres in partnership with NGO’s and MFI’s, we plan to setup 100 REC’s within 5 years – serving over 10,000 villages across India.
Why did you choose to be entrepreneurs that give more than they take?
We chose to be entrepreneurs because we enjoy the freedom to follow our passions and to make a mark with whatever we do.
What advice do you have for entrepreneurs who are yet to begin on their business ideas?
Start putting your ideas on the ground – it will grow into something beautiful – don’t just wait for a miracle (read funding) to happen.
What do you think limits the potential of an (Indian) entrepreneur?
Indian Bureaucracy and Indian Govt Offices – Nothing needs to be said of them.
Education – It not only makes one risk-averse, but also weighs you down with debt that take to pay tuition – while offering thick salaries which you don’t want to say no to.
What do you believe you could have done better as an amateur entrepreneur?
Taking too long to start – we spent too much time with too many technologies and ideas – and came back to start with our initial idea.
Has ONergy found recognition for its great work in the rural energy sector?
AEEI – Alliance for Energy Enterprise Innovation (AEEI) is a Consortium of Selco, Grameen Foundation, E+Co. Among the 4 selected across India.
FYSE – Foundation For Youth Social Entrepreneurship guides social enterprises with startup.
Hindustan Times BYCL – A platform to network with other entrepreneurs.
IIT Kanpur Next 50 – A platform to showcase 50 great business ideas.
Ennovent – Selected amongst the top 10 business idea.
What the vision you wish to achieve by 2011?
Provide 5000 solar lighting and electrification kits and electrify 10 villages by 2011.
Vinay Jaju, Piyush Jaju and Ekta Kothari are three entrepreneurs who we believe have the spirit to be able to achieve a great many things. It is not just their entrepreneurial acumen but their consciousness of action that makes them and Onergy stand out… We wish them luck and hope that they will continue to work for the benefit of others.
Reference Link
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827824.800-cellphones-reveal-emerging-disease-outbreaks.html
Courtesy
YourStory.in
Indian neutrino lab to boast world's biggest magnet
A major neutrino observatory set to be built in India cleared a major hurdle this week, when the Ministry of Environment and Forests formally approved the project.
The $250 million underground laboratory, called the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), will be built in the Bodi West Hills Reserved Forest in the state of Tamil Nadu.
The hills there rise very steeply, so workers will have to tunnel only about 2 kilometres horizontally to provide the laboratory with about 1300 metres of high-quality granite cover above. The rock cover is needed to shield the neutrino detector from particles called muons that form when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere.
INO will be made of 50,000 tonnes of magnetised iron, dwarfing the 12,500-tonne magnet in the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. “It’ll be the most massive magnet [ever built],” says team member M. V. N. Murthy of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
Anti-neutrinos too
Neutrinos will interact with the iron – which will be layered in sheets – and spew out charged particles, whose paths will be bent by the iron’s magnetic field. About 30,000 detectors sandwiched between the sheets of iron will track these charged particles, providing information about the incident neutrinos.
INO will initially study atmospheric neutrinos, which are produced when cosmic rays smash into the upper atmosphere.
Unlike most neutrino detectors, such as the Super-Kamiokande in Japan or the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, INO will be sensitive to both neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, which interact with matter in different ways.
Neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts oscillate between three types: electron, tau and muon. INO should help physicists understand which of the three types is the lightest and which is the heaviest.
Elephants and tigers
INO scientists hope the observatory will also be used to detect neutrinos beamed from specialised neutrino factories that might be built at CERN or Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois. “We are uniquely situated to look at those neutrinos,” says Murthy.
Because the source of neutrinos from those sites would be highly controlled, physicists could study how neutrinos oscillate from one type to another as they pass through the Earth to INO.
This was not the first time the INO team has tried to get environmental clearance for its laboratory. Previously, project leaders had selected a site in the Nilgiri Mountains in Tamil Nadu. The site already boasted an underground power station with 13 kilometres of tunnels, but the access road to reach it crossed an elephant corridor.
Even as physicists worked out how to minimise disruptions to wandering elephants, a wildflife sanctuary nearby was declared a tiger reserve in 2008. The observatory would have been perilously close to the reserve’s 5-kilometre-wide buffer zone, so the project was denied clearance at that site.
Reference Link
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19620-indian-neutrino-lab-to-boast-worlds-biggest-magnet.html
Courtesy
Reed Business Information Ltd.
Computer Modeling of Swimming Fish Could Lead To New Robots and Prosthetics
COLLEGE PARK, Md — Scientists at the University of Maryland and Tulane University have developed a computational model of a swimming fish that is the first to address the interaction of both internal and external forces on locomotion. The interdisciplinary research team simulated how the fish’s flexible body bends, depending on both the forces from the fluid moving around it as well as the muscles inside. Understanding these interactions, even in fish, will help design medical prosthetics for humans that work with the body’s natural mechanics, rather than against them. This research is published in the October 18, 2010 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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“When a fish moves in a fluid, muscles contract, but the fluid also moves against the body. So, the amount the body moves depends on the internal muscle force and the external reaction of fluids,” explained Eric D. Tytell, who conducted this research as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Professor Avis Cohen, Department of Biology and Institute for Systems Research. “Previous studies examined body mechanics separately from fluid mechanics because it is a very hard problem to solve. This is the first time that anyone has put together a computational framework to simulate this for large, fast animals like fishes.
Understanding the general principles of animal movement could help to design and inspire engineered systems, including robots and medical prosthetics. This simulation was developed for the lamprey, a primitive vertebrate whose nervous system is being used as a model by Cohen and colleagues to develop prosthetic devices for people with spinal cord injuries.
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Two silver lampreys, Ichthyomyzon unicuspis, some of the most primitive existing vertebrates. The lamprey nervous system is being used as a model to develop prosthetic devices for people with spinal cord injuries. Credit: Eric D. Tytell. University of Maryland. |
“The devices may one day help people regain control over their legs and walk again, Cohen said. “We understand to first order the neural circuit that controls the muscles for swimming or walking. Now, for neuroprosthetics, we need to understand how the muscles interact with the body and the environment – our model helps us do that.
Chia-yu Hsu, a postdoctoral researcher at Tulane University, and Tytell performed simulations with different values for various body and fluid properties. One property that they discovered was particularly important in determining how well a fish swims is body stiffness.
Take a lamprey and a barracuda as examples — if you hold a freshly dead lamprey, it just drops, because it is a very floppy fish, Tytell explains. But if you take a fish like a barracuda, their bodies are stiffer and don’t flop much. We wanted to know what difference does the floppy vs. stiff body make? If their muscles produced the same amount of force, then the floppy body, since it bends more, should accelerate more rapidly, but also expend more energy. And the stiff body should accelerate more slowly because it bends less, but once it gets going, it should use less energy.
But in reality, this doesn’t happen — barracudas generally accelerate faster than lampreys. The simulations show that barracudas’ muscles are probably stronger than lampreys’, matched to the higher body stiffness. That may be why barracudas strike so quickly, Tytell said.
Lisa Fauci, professor of mathematics at Tulane University, has been developing the mathematical models and computational simulations required to gain insight into complex biological systems where flexible structures interact with a surrounding fluid.
“It is incredibly rewarding to work with biologists who embrace scientific computing as an essential facet of research, and to see that our simulations can address fundamental questions in physiology,” Fauci said.
“The simulations demonstrate that matching the mechanical properties of future prosthetic devices to the body’s natural mechanics will be crucial. We’ll have to get the mechanics right,” Cohen said.
But the research also provides biologists with quantitative information that can be applied to understand the biodiversity and evolution of fishes.
Evolutionary biologists are interested in figuring out what the selective pressures were that led to a species having certain characteristics, and one of the things that it very important is locomotion. How animals move relates to their ability to find food, locate mates, and to escape predators,” explained Tytell. “So this information is likely to have evolutionary importance in how fish evolved mechanically.”
The team plans to continue working with the model, using it to examine why different fishes are shaped differently.
“What difference does it make to be shaped like an eel or shaped like a trout?” Tytell says. “We understand pretty well the difference that shape makes for things like submarines that don’t bend, but not so well for fishes.”
They will also simulate sensory systems to try to figure out how fish maneuver so agilely through turbulent water.
“The first line of defense against external perturbations such as eddies in the water for fishes, or tripping on a rock for humans, isn’t the nervous system, but rather the body’s mechanics, kind of like the shocks on a car. If we can translate the mechanical stability that living organisms exhibit into the design of robots or prosthetics, we could really advance the technology,” Tytell said.
Reference Link
http://newsdesk.umd.edu/bigissues/release.cfm?ArticleID=2254
Courtesy
University of Maryland
Cellphones reveal emerging disease outbreaks
YOUR cellphone could be a key tool in the fight against disease by relaying a telltale signature of illness to doctors and agencies monitoring new outbreaks.
“This technology is an early warning system,” says Anmol Madan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose team concluded that you can spot cases of flu by looking for changes in the movement and communication patterns of infected people.
Epidemiologists know that disease outbreaks change mobility patterns, but until now have been unable to track these patterns in any detail. So Madan and colleagues gave cellphones to 70 students in an undergraduate dormitory. The phones came with software that supplied the team with anonymous data on the students’ movements, phone calls and text messages. The students also completed daily surveys on their mental and physical health.
A characteristic signature of illness emerged from the data, which was gathered over a 10-week period in early 2009. Students who came down with a fever or full-blown flu tended to move around less and make fewer calls late at night and early in the morning. When Madan trained software to hunt for this signature in the cellphone data, a daily check correctly identified flu victims 90 per cent of the time.
The technique could be used to monitor the health status of individuals who live alone. Madan is developing a smartphone app that will alert a named contact, perhaps a relative or doctor, when a person’s communication and movement patterns suggest that they are ill.
Public health officials could also use the technique to spot emerging outbreaks of illness ahead of conventional detection systems, which today rely on reports from doctors and virus-testing labs. Similar experiments in larger groups and in different communities will have to be done first though.
Leon Danon at the University of Warwick, UK, is negotiating with the ministry of health of a northern European nation about a project that would combine the anonymous cellphone records of around 10,000 people with their health records to produce signatures of disease from a larger population.
Researchers will need to think hard about the causes of the changes they see in the cellphone data, says Nathan Eagle at MIT, who is working with Danon. Eagle looked at cellular data from a series of cholera outbreaks in Rwanda between 2006 and 2009. He saw a clear reduction in people’s movement, which may have been due to the disease. But the outbreak was caused by floods, which also limited mobility. Distinguishing between the two possible causes on the basis of phone data alone was impossible, he says.
Madan presented his paper last month at the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing in Copenhagen, Denmark.
"Farming on my rooftop to be self sustainable" says, Jagadish Shri from Bangalore
Mr. Jagadish Shri in Banashankari set up his own terrace garden where he grows organic vegetables like beans and carrots. “Healthy food locally produced without incurring any transportation carbon miles was the primary reason to get started on this journey”, says Shri, who works as a technical manager at Wipro Technologies in Madiwala.In August 2009 he set up his 40 sq ft organic vegetable terrace garden, where he now grows beans, ladiesfinger, carrot, knolkhol (Kohlrabi) and brinjal. He uses these vegetables in his own kitchen.
One of the many interesting aspects of this garden is the use of two different types of containers. Initially, being unable to use the boxes Shri purchased, from the company near Bannerghatta Road, due to their interference with his RWH system, he began with 22 regular earthen pots that he placed in a sunny patch on the terrace.
And then, earlier this year, at a workshop by Dr B N Vishwanath (a pioneer in promoting urban agriculture, who regularly conducts workshops on organic terrace gardening), Shri got further impetus to expand his terrace garden experiment! He learnt to make his own terrace garden containers with deal wood (recycled packing material) and a metal frame, that he now uses on his terrace.
The initial investment he made for the pots, boxes, compost and said was around Rs 5000. Now he spends anywhere between Rs 100-200 every three months.
Shri is next looking to make his garden as self-sustaining as possible and minimise the inputs needed from outside such as soil and fertiliser. He also does not want to increase the water consumption significantly for the garden. He has just started experiementing with growing fruits like guava, pomegranate and sapota.
The smartphone's shape-shifting future
The smartphone of the future might lose its sleek, solid shell to become a shape-shifter, able to alter its appearance to signal an alert in situations where visual and audible cues won’t do.
Feeling the squeeze (Image: Joey Hardwick/Flickr)
Shwetak Patel, a computer science and engineering researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues have developed a squeezable cellphone – SqueezeBlock – using tiny motors built into the casing to mimic the behaviour of a spring.
Pressure plates on the device detect how much force is being applied to the casing, while the motors control the amount of resistance exerted in response. Because the resistance can be tweaked, the degree of squishability can be controlled by some aspect of the phone’s status to provide some basic feedback without demanding the attention of eyes or ears.
For example, after the battery is fully charged, the phone might feel as taut as a glutton’s post-lunch belly, while a gadget running on empty might be as easy to squeeze as a stress ball. Alternatively, the stiffness could convey the number of emails marked as important that have arrived in a user’s inbox.
“You can imagine squeezing the phone to give you a little bit of information on its status – ring level, messages – without having to look at it,” says Patel.
Squish test
In trials, Patel asked 10 people to test seven different uses of SqueezeBlock. They were able to distinguish up to four levels of squishiness, suggesting it could provide a basic way of checking battery charge, for instance.
The work was presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in New York last week.
Shwetak’s team isn’t alone in exploring how a handset’s physical attributes could communicate something about its state. Back in 2008, Fabian Hemmert, a researcher at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin, Germany, breathed virtual life into a cellphone
. His phone “inhales” and “exhales” at a steady rate, which can increase suddenly to indicate an incoming call, or ebb away as the battery dies.
Hemmert is now exploring how tactile feedback could provide further cues. He has devised mechanisms that enable mobile devices to change their shape and even their weight.
This way
His shape-shifting device uses motors to move the handset’s panels apart, creating a wedge shape. Feeling that one side of the phone is thicker than then other could alert the user that there is additional content available that the screen is too small to show but which can be found in the thicker direction, says Hemmert. For instance, if a user was scrolling horizontally through a photographic slideshow, the phone’s right-hand side would gradually thin and the left-hand side would thicken.
A different handset, meanwhile, houses a weight resting on two perpendicular runners, so that it can be moved in two dimensions. Our hands are remarkably adept at detecting shifts in balance, says Hemmert, so that when used in conjunction with a mapping application, the phone’s centre of balance can move in the direction a user should travel to reach a desired destination. This would allow people to navigate a foreign city without having to actually look at the map – helping them take in the sights while avoiding collisions with the locals. Hemmert is presenting the work at the Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2010 in Reykjavik, Iceland, this week.
Reference Link
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19569-innovation-the-smartphones-shapeshifting-future.html
Courtesy
Reed Business Information Ltd.
Two brothers help farmers to pump out ground water from a depth of 50 to 60 feet and save fuel cost in Assam: Rural Innovation Series
Mohammad Mehtar Hussain and his younger brother Mushtaq Ahmad are farmers in the Darrang district of Assam
These entrepreneurial brothers own two acres of land, and produce just enough paddy to feed their families. As cultivating paddy is a water-intensive task, drawing out large amounts of groundwater was difficult due to frequent power cuts. Moreover, the alternative of pumping out water using a diesel set was too expensive and hand-pumping required a lot of effort. This set the brothers thinking, and in 2003 they came up with a solution that was a much cheaper and effective alternative. They invented a simple windmill using bamboo and a tin sheet, and attached it to a hand-pump.
The genesis of their invention is interesting, given the fact that the brothers are educated only up to higher secondary level and have no technical background. While looking around for an answer to their problem, their eyes fell on the movement of a sewing machine.
They observed how the circular motion of the wheel resulted in the up-and-down movement of the needle. This formed a rough impression of how their solution would work. However, the major problem of how they would generate enough energy to make it function still remained.
The solution to this came when one day they were watching kites, and a sudden gust of wind made them soar higher. They concluded that a large wheel, moving by the power of wind, could be attached to the handle of a hand-pump to pump out water continuously. They made their first prototype using bamboo, old tyres, iron, and so on. How the innovation took shape –
The basic model of the windmill consisted of a tower-like structure, made of two parallel bamboo posts. These were connected using an iron shaft, which in turn mounted the blades of the windmill. The wind makes the blades move, thus rotating the shaft. Being connected to the handle of the hand-pump, the rotating motion of the shaft results in the pumping out of water. However, this static model of the windmill has several advantages and disadvantages.
Cost: Rs 6,000 (Static Model) / Rs 40,000 (Improvised Model)
Made of inexpensive, locally available materials, such as bamboo and aluminum sheets, made it much cheaper than traditional windmills. Moreover, the entire unit could be assembled and dismantled in an hour, making it portable. No foundation was required for installation as the bamboo poles could be erected by digging holes in the ground. On the flip side, as the blades were static, they rotate only when facing the direction of the wind. Second, being light in weight, it did not withstand high-velocity wind. Third, there was no brake system in this design—it has to be stopped by inserting a wooden pole between the blades. Fourth, compared to traditional windmills made from sturdy materials, bamboo has a shorter life. This limited its use in all seasons, especially during the rains and the winter.
As the popularity of the windmill slowly spread, another innovator, Karunakanth Nath, whose innovation was already being supported by the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) North East, introduced it to the organization. The NIF awarded it a cash prize and a certificate from former President Abdul Kalam. Says Mushtaq “That was the proudest moment of my life.”
The National innovation Foundation supported the innovation through its offshoot Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network (GIAN) by providing funds. It started working on the defects of the windmill. Several were installed in IIT-Guwahati for technical analysis. At around the same time, GIAN West installed a prototype of the windmill in Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat for salt farming on an experimental basis. India, with an average annual salt production of 157 lakh tonnes, is the third largest salt producer in the world. However, according to GIAN’s estimates, for producing 1,000 tonnes of salt, a salt farmer has to spend approximately Rs 1 lakh, of which nearly Rs 60,000 is spent on fuel for diesel sets for pumping out saline water. According to Mushtaq, “The response that we received was very positive. Our windmill proved to be cheaper as well as effective.” The two brothers have definitely added their names in the Indian rural innovation chapter.
Goodness Apple 
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